The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the
mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it.
The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal
chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion. In
respect to desire, on one hand, and to reason, on the other, the will acts like
"a kind of coup d'etat," as
Bergson once said, and this implies, of course, that "free acts are
exceptional": "although we are free whenever we are willing to get
back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing." In other
words, it is impossible to deal with the willing activity without touching on
the problem of freedom. (Arendt, Lectures,
p.4)
Arendt is magnificently right. The
bourgeoisie is always torn between promulgating the scientific necessity of
capitalism with its “economic laws” and, in contradiction, championing the
“freedom” that this objectively necessary system bestows on all of society. We
have thus an authoritarian economy and a liberal society. How social freedom can be guaranteed objectively, that is, in the absence of
participatory democracy, is the great Arcanum
of liberal-capitalist society. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have any
colour you like, so long as it’s a car! Thus, the bourgeoisie always totters
between the necessity of the allocation of social resources to production and
distribution according to capitalist laws (Steve Jobs telling you what is going
to be produced – and therefore how your living activity is going to be applied)
– and the “freedom” of consumer choice that supposedly drives production (Steve
Jobs merely guessed and gave you what you always wanted but did not know it!
Interestingly, and correctly, in the Theorie
Schumpeter excludes consumer choice as a driver of capitalist accumulation.). This
is the garbage that the bourgeoisie gives us under the guise of “freedom”!
But as Arendt reminds us, it is the irreducibility
of the communicability of human
thought – even when thought is supposedly the innermost and most “ineffable”
element of human existence – that is the insuperable obstacle of scientism. Thought
is intrinsically communicable not because we can relate our experiences to
“others” – indeed, Arendt is wrong in presuming that any human experience is
“communicable” in her sense, because, as Nietzsche stressed, all human concepts
are mere signs. But what is “communicable” about human thought is precisely the
fact that all thoughts are inconceivable without a “dia-logue”, a splitting up,
of the thinker into a dialogue with its own “self”. The “self” therefore can no
longer be seen as “one” but involves an ineluctable duality. This is consistent
with Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of perception” on which Arendt based her Life of the Mind.
It is surprising and a little disappointing therefore
that Arendt failed to go deeper than Kant in her amplification of the great
philosopher’s notion of sensus communis
as ontogenetic instead of phylogenetic – as is amply revealed in this quotation
from her editor:
In the present context, the most important section of Kant's
work is § 40 of the Critique of Judgment, entitled "Taste as a kind of
sensus communis." Kant writes that
by the name of sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a
public sense, i.e., a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes
account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as
it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind.... This
is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather
122 PART TWO
with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting
ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction
from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.
Kant specifies three "maxims of common human understanding,"
which are: (1) Think for oneself; (2) Think from the standpoint of everyone
else; and (3) Always think consistently. It is the second of these, which Kant
refers to as the maxim of enlarged
thought, that concerns us here, for it is the one that, according to Kant,
belongs to judgment (the first and third apply to understanding and reason,
respectively). Kant observes that we designate someone as a "man of enlarged mind ... if he detaches
himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment, which
cramp the minds of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgment from a
universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the
standpoint of others)." Kant concludes that we can rightfully refer to
aesthetic judgment and taste as a sensus
communis, or "public sense." This particular discussion issues in
the definition of taste as "the faculty of estimating what makes our
feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the
mediation of a concept." (pp.121-2)
Again, Arendt seemed to go along with Kant’s
definition of sensus communis or “enlarged
thought” as what a human does “if he
detaches himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment”. But
this is precisely the point! That “judgement” does not pertain to “the
subjective personal conditions” of a single human being but rather judgement is
the one condition that is essential to the very conception of a human being –
because judgement (thinking) is the very essence of being human! The expression
of a judgement may well be subjective and personal – but that is not what is
important about the faculty of judgement. What is quintessential about
judgement is precisely its being the human faculty kat esochen, par excellence! Thinking is judging: the voice of
conscience, the vox interioris, is the most public voice of
all. Just how little even the insightful Arendt penetrated this reality is
shown in the Lectures – and in the
Postscript by her editor:
But what renders this concept of considerably wider
application is the idea that thinking in public can be constitutive of thinking
as such. This insight runs counter to widespread assumptions about the nature
of thinking, according to which thought can operate privately no less well than
publicly. (p.122)
No. Not “thinking in public” can be “constitutive of
thinking as such”; it is in fact the other way around: thinking as such is in reality constitutive of thinking in public!
Arendt and Kant start from the false premise that thinking is “private”, in
fact the most private reality of all! But it is not! Thinking is ineluctably “public”
in embryo and in nuce. Failure to capture this phylogenetic element of human experience leads to the dead end of
Kantian “sociability” (Geselligkeit) –
a bourgeois concept if ever there was one – which is why Colletti (From Rousseau to Kant) correctly paused
on Kant’s description of bourgeois society as ungesellige Geselligkeit (unsociable sociability) to highlight his
inveterate liberalism. Communicability is central to thought. All thought, qua thought, is communicable. Thus,
freedom is not to be understood as vapid decisionism, as a “spiritual” entity,
but as the most materialistic, immanent aspect of human being, of being human. The
emancipation of human society must be based on this fundamental realization:
And this is of some relevance to a whole set of problems by
which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice
and to all attempts to arrive at a halfway plausible theory of ethics. Since
Hegel and Marx, these questions have been treated in the perspective of History
and on the as-
Postscriptum to Thinking 5
sumption that there is such a thing as Progress of the human
race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these
matters. Either we can say with Hegel: Die
Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to
Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and
their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into
being. (Arendt, op.cit., pp.4-5)
As with Schopenhauer and predestination, for the
bourgeoisie success or the accumulation of capital is its own justification. Even
Marx, in seeking to historicise social antagonism, came close to turning his
critique of capitalist society into a teleology or indeed (as Bobbio [Da Hobbes a Marx] says about the Paris Manuscripts) even into an
eschatology, just like Hegel’s (again, Arendt’s judgement in the Lectures on Kant is impeccable, as is
her reference there to Kojeve’s famous study on the Phenomenology).
Just how relevant all this is to cultural criticism
is displayed by this review of the recent film, “The Martian”, by Max Brody in The New Yorker:
Scott is
interested solely in the characters’ function in relation to the success of the
mission to rescue Mark. His characters are free of history and devoid of
intimate crises; their identity isn’t celebrated or even acknowledged in any
substantial way, it’s filtered out. Scott delivers a vision of a pure and
impersonal scientific meritocracy, and he envisions science and its locked-in
binary implacability (leading to the ultimate binary opposition—life or death)
as a model for societal integration.
His
characters just do it; the movie’s key scientific lightbulb moment is delivered
by a young, brilliant mathematician (Donald Glover) with cool slacker-hipster
manners and distracted people skills. The chief engineer, Bruce Ng (Benedict
Wong), is messy and somewhat uncommunicative, but he can meet the schedule.
And, of course, from the perspective of the success or failure of the mission
to rescue Mark, nothing matters except the technical skills to conceive it and
to execute it. But those skills belong to people, with ideas and habits of
mind, passions and emotional burdens, inclinations and aversions, fears and
desires, which don’t vanish when the subject turns to science.
Scott seems
to be offering a sort of advertisement for technical achievement as a model of
human achievement, but it’s one in which the human factor is left out….
The
relentless focus on technical achievement, in the absence of the complexity of
the characters—in the absence of cultural identities and emotional connections,
backstories and ambitions, the drive of will and ideological commitment, of
fantasy and distraction—is the very antithesis of artistic creation. The first
remarkable, impersonal technical achievement that Scott seems to be celebrating
is his own.
We shall deal with the problem of theory and
practice in the next intervention.
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